and ‘60s, there had been an effort to link the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge with an elevated freeway along the waterfront of the Embarcadero. Fortunately, there was a big effort in the late ‘60s to halt that freeway at Broadway Street. For the southern portion of the waterfront between the Bay Bridge and Broadway, there was a double-decker, four-lane-wide freeway that just stopped and would drop people back to the ground level. The day of the earthquake was pretty traumatic. A 7.0 earthquake gets your attention right away. It was during the World Series; everybody was eager to get out of the office. Then the earthquake hit. In those days, I was taking the ferry back and forth from Marin County. I’d gotten down to the waterfront and didn’t really realize that the viaduct (the double decker) had been severely damaged. We’re all streaming under it to catch a ferry out of the city. Then we got to the docks, and somebody said, “Hey, look.” The traffic was stopped on the Bay Bridge because a portion of it had collapsed. Getting out of town that day on the ferry was life-altering. As we started to work on the reconstruction efforts, I was working with a group of four other young guys. So, we came together: Alex Bonutti, FAIA, who was president of AIA San Francisco; Tom Lollini, FAIA, who was the campus architect at UC Berkeley; Clark Manus, FAIA, who I was working with at Heller Leake at the time, now Heller Manus Architects; and then Bruce Race, FAIA, FAPA, who was a planner. We lamented how the freeway had separated the city and the waterfront. We started to think, why rebuild that freeway? Why spend hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild that and perpetuate this division in the city from its heritage and from the beauty of that waterfront? We put together some ideas. We were all dealing with the bureaucracy: the planning commissions and landmarks, and also had relationships with the Sierra Club, San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) and others, which were very engaged in the future of the city. We started shopping our ideas to those groups. We got the AIA component behind it, and we took the show on the road. We found ourselves in the office of San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos. We sold Mayor Agnos on the idea. Margie O’Driscoll, who was his deputy mayor for the arts, was very much behind it as well. That launched us into a six-month effort to sell it across the city. Fortunately, with the mayor’s backing, people agreed to it and understood it would make the city a better place to live. It was very trying because people were just eager to get things back to normal, and they had not recognized that the commute patterns and the way people traveled had changed. What they saw was that the auto traffic coming off of the Embarcadero Freeway, feeding Chinatown, feeding North Beach really had passed away. They weren’t the big drivers as they had been, tourism was more important than suburban visitors. There were a lot of technical challenges, however. We were successful in getting it torn down, and that led to other pieces of remnant freeway throughout the city being removed to get the city back together. Now when you go to the Embarcadero in San Francisco and you see the historic trolley, you can see the ships coming in and out. It all came out of the efforts of AIA San Francisco and its members with an idea. You moved to a national forum. How did that happen? What did you learn from that? I rose through the ranks in San Francisco to become president and became more engaged with AIA California Council (CC) as a result of that leadership. Paul Welsh, Hon. AIA, who was the executive director for many years of AIA CC, was very adept at leading the volunteers. Paul had been the director at the state level for the licensing board before joining AIA. He knew the profession very well and also understood that it was the voice of the architects out in the community that made the most sense. He was also very adept at spotting people and helping put them in positions where they could influence the course of events. While I was coming up through the ranks, I went to my first national convention conference in Boston. This was at the time that the Presidio at the north end of the San Francisco Peninsula was being integrated into the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. AIA San Francisco and California Council had put forth a resolution for AIA National to endorse that process. We didn’t have a large contingent of San Franciscans at that Boston convention. At the California caucus, the day of the annual business meeting, where we were going to be talking about these resolutions, the president of the California Council asked, “Who’s going to speak on behalf of the resolution?” I’m just sitting there since it’s my first time. I’m just a pup. And Paul just goes, “RK is from San Francisco; he’ll do it.” And I was like, “Who, me? Are you kidding?” And so, with like 15 minutes of American Conservatory Theatre 13
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